eye spy new places

[Scronan]

Hi Alz

Man, and I thought my job was bad, well it is...but I do learn a lot and pay stinks to high heaven.

Aye, it would have been cool to see Highlander stuff, or maybe a "MacCloud Claymore" or something! The weapons seemed to be done hastily...I was kind of disappointed with them.

Hmm, sounds like you were the man with the ideas, and a lot of them weren't listened to. You know, I could see now why a sequel may not be made, sounds like things were pretty rough!

So, maybe you know, where is DWB these days? He seems to have vanished...do you think he'll make another in this genre?

Again, thanks for sharing!

Scronan

DWB's probably tinkering on some new submission/proposal for another game. Dunno if it'd be a Wizards sequel. Chances are it'll definately be some fantasy/RPG type game.

Concerning development woes:
I was really upset when they removed the 3rd person camera and the ability to split up your party. I suppose since the public had never seen Wizards in that way, it wasn't missed that much. But after playing it for several years and working over a year on PC animation and costumes, it was hard to just let it go. It was damn exciting watching the characters I built up from scratch tromp around the world on horseback or swim or shoot spells. Despite some pretty dynamic camera AI, I heard it was ultimately removed because the dungeon's weren't made to support the over-the-head camera with it's low ceilings. Of course I think this option should be left up to the individual player (and if those new levels were ever put in, it'd alleviate alot of this "low-ceiling" issue). What more than likely happened (I'm just guessing) is that the PCs were removed because over the system requirments. I think the engine was pushing a minimum of 72 MB of RAM just to operate with all it's bells and whistles (including the XX MB PC models with their 700x800something textures). A good way to cut that down is to just wipe those guys out. Probably should have gone with a skeletal based animation set rather than the single-mesh/vertex animation system, but at the time (1995), skeletal stuff just wasn't that impressive.

ramble ramble

[meow]

Actually I am impressed that someone was willing to remove features in order to meet some requirements set up ahead of time. Often I have seen the requirements changed to meet the features and that the date and feature set will not slip so everyone is looking at 120+ hour weeks just to get the thing in a moderately usable shape.

If it is okay to ask... do the credits reflect the whole development staff or were there additional people that did not make it onto the credits?

>I was really upset when they removed the 3rd person camera and the ability to split up your party. I suppose since the public had never seen Wizards in that way, it wasn't missed that much. But after playing it for several years and working over a year on PC animation and costumes, it was hard to just let it go. It was damn exciting watching the characters I built up from scratch tromp around the world on horseback or swim or shoot spells.

Re this: First off, I am not very computer knowledgeable, so forgive me if I express a desire for something that is not possible. Before I played WW, I played Return to Krondor. It wasn't as long as I like a game to be and was fairly simple without much depth but I absolutely loved the battle options. I am not sure if you are talking about the ability to see and place your characters in battle but that is what I really did miss in this game - more than sleeping . I like to be able to protect certain characters when needed and allow my characters to be placed strategically, according to their skills and abilities.

Thanks for the link - that was very cool. And despite all the "I wishes" spoken, I still love my game.

RE: 3rd person combat.

There was an option to just "DEFEND" which meant your character would stand it's ground and only defend itself. This was removed when all the characters were phased into one "being" or location. I used the DEFEND option all the time when you were able to split your party up.

See the way Wizards was first wired up, all six of your characters were individual people *in* the world (so you saw all your characters in their glory (or disgust?) running around the levels, following whatever character you picked to move around the world with. So when combat took place, your party had a physical relationship to everything. You could line up your characters behind objects or other players to make sure they didn't get hammered by the monsters. Using DEFEND, meant they stood their ground and didn't move around if you picked one of your characters to charged the monsters with.

I would typically spend my time fighting with my lead character and have the rest of my party on "auto", so they'd do the last action/attack on the last monster I told them to. I'd be running around, swinging my sword (negating the turn-based-option by choice) and as I'm wacking on some evil priest, my party would be shooting arrows, slashing ghouls, or casting spells at the rest of the monsters. Verrrry cinematic in some aspects.

Then at some point, beta testers at Virgin said it was too hard to manage all 6 characters at one time. So, HPI squeezed all your characters into one location, having them phase in and out depending on who was currently active. However ... you still had the option to split your party up in groups, so you could have a group of 4 go one way and a group of 2 go another way. This still made it possible to split the whole party up into 6 groups, letting you see all your party members in the world at the same time.

But with the removal of multiplayer, and the "problems" with low ceilings and 3rd person cameras, the PCs were removed from the 3D world, and therefore the ability to split up your party, negating any way to place your characters in any sort of defensive position for combat. You were basically left with a "6-headed" character.

To remove this option to lower the requirements for the game was a quick and dirty solution. This was probably the only thing that could have been removed. Even then, I think the system requirements are too high. There was no way this game would have done any sales if released a year before and a XXX-pentium requirement with 64 MB of RAM. I'd take a guess and say the engine code is fairly dated and bloated for what it is.

RE: credits.
I believe everyone involved at HPI was listed on the one-page credits. You could say we almost had 2 teams. There was a period where we had some weird synergy and heaps of wonderful ideas emerged from the team. A lot of this overflowed into the NOX development -- when HPI was asked to the the graphics for NOX (before Westwood bought the rights to it and totally changed it), the team had several sessions with NOX's creator and carved out some fantastic game ideas.

But since development for Wizards was taking longer than expected with most of the remaining work focused on level design and programming, some of the team members left to do other gigs (a couple of them landed at Blizzard!). Then more people were hired and this sorta built up the 2nd team which did polish spots here and there on Wizards while graphics for sequels to UNREAL were being pumped out.

I'm not quite sure what the current team is over at HPI. It's too bad it took this long for Wizards to hit the shelves. I watched Quake come and go, with its sequels and several iterations of Tomb Raider pop up during the production of Wizards. Man, it'd be pretty wild if Wizards had come out when scheduled! You'd probably have just finished SWORDS & SORCERY 2 (that's what it was called back then) while we wrapped up S&S III for an X-MAS release [and all the cool ideas you guys have come up would probably be incorporated into the 2nd and 3rd one with new suggestion rolling into the 4th one]

[meow]

It is pretty amazing that you guys were able to do this with that small of a team and that many changes in direction. I know there are problems with it and features that could be added but still... wow.

Are you no longer at HPI or just not on that team anymore?

I'm not at HPI anymore and all the original people are no longer there (except for DWB). Once in awhile I'm still tempted to go back, but at the moment, I want to finish a project and see the full cycle of development (I left a year before Wizards came out, because I had no interest in doing graphics for Unreal 2). I work at Monolith right now, but for a spell I was working at Sierra on Middle Earth Online (oh boy, and I thought only small companies made poor decisions! What Sierra in "cancelling" MEO was ... well they might as well just shoot themselves in the head and end it quickly).

[meow]

Yeah Sierra is a little mixed up. They are the company that directed Dynamix to produce multiple versions of a Bass Fishing game.

Speaking of HPI (or any where else for that matter)... a friend of mine just got laid off. He is a Graphic artist and has done some UI work. Do you think there would be anyinterest. He is in LA and would pretty much want to stay here but might contract if he could work from home.

Well most game developers want people under the same roof. Just too much little stuff that can't be done if the people are spread out over several states. I don't think HPI is in any position to hire anyone right now -- however, it's quite possible that someone could get hired there with only a little experience, if the ball gets rolling again -- the demo reel has to be something tangible to the game developer environment. I can't tell you how many demo tapes I saw that were artsy-college reels and not samples of game mechanics at work.